The War On The Fishing Industry Continues

On Thursday, the Washington Examiner posted an article about the Obama Administration’s continuing war on the fishing industry. Having lived in Massachusetts for a number of years, I saw the results of this war. I also saw that on occasion Massachusetts elected people to Congress who would fight the Administration on this issue. Scott Brown was one of those people, and oddly enough, so was Barney Frank. Both men understood the importance of the fishing industry to New England and also understood that the environmentalists who were fighting that industry were often fudging the numbers they were using in that fight.

The article at the Washington Examiner points out the money behind the attack on the fishing industry. The article has an illustration of the groups that are funding the attack. Please follow the link to the article and view the chart–it is amazing.

The article reports:

For more than a decade, the National Marine Fisheries Service has devoured fishing fleets while Big Green’s money octopus prods the feds by waving grant-eating enviros in its tentacles, causing them to hook the public’s attention with mindless frenzy against “overfishing.”

…Stolpe (Nils Stolpe, veteran executive, consultant, and advocate for the commercial fishing community) hopes to get fair play. He spoke of the House Natural Resources Committee Chairman Doc Hastings, R-Wash., and panel members’ concern over attacks on the seafood industry. Stolpe said, “They’ve had four hearings this year, getting ready to reauthorize the primary ocean fisheries management law.”

That law, the Magnuson-Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Act, has had provisions for a thriving, respected seafood industry since it was first passed in 1976 — but Big Green pressure has blotted out everything that would help production.

University of Washington fisheries Professor Ray Hilborn focused on that problem in a September committee hearing, pointing out that the Magnuson-Stevens Act provides not only for rebuilding fish stocks, ensuring conservation and protecting essential habitat, but also, “the Act makes it clear that one objective is to provide for ‘the development of fisheries which are underutilized or not utilized … to assure that our citizens benefit from the employment, food supply and revenue which could be generated thereby.’”

Hopefully the attack on the fishing industry can be stopped before all of the small fisherman are put out of business.

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